


Four Coats

by FidgetyWriter



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, fear of intimacy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 11:28:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6115092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FidgetyWriter/pseuds/FidgetyWriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Margitte Trevelyan has managed to keep everyone she's loved at arm's length--not because she really wants to but out of a sense of self preservation born in the Circle at Ostwick. She wants that to change with Cullen but sometimes the instinct to keep herself safe runs too deep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Coats

Margitte had four coats that she could remember in between arriving at the Circle and fleeing to her cousins’ home after its dissolution. Each one had served their two jobs admirably: staving off the biting cold of the Circle corridors in winter and keeping anyone from touching her.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be touched. She was the young woman known for holding her friends’ hands whenever possible or hugging those around her for the smallest of victories. Rather, it was the kind of touching that went beyond hand holding and embraces: the kind she sometimes wished her fellow mages would have been more discreet about practicing with one another when she was trying to study. 

Yet now, when she was wrapped up in the fur lined, hand embroidered coat Cullen had shipped all the way from Denerim for her, she felt the bubbling need to burst free. When they walked the ramparts together and talked about anything besides battles or strategy, it was all she could do to cling to it and keep warm against the bitterness of Skyhold’s valley. 

But when the walks ended and she lingered in his office for a few moments longer than she should and he kissed her cold nose, she wanted nothing more than for him to tear the coat from her body and take her up to his bed.

Cullen wouldn’t though because he was too traditional for such a bold move, and she supposed she might be as well.

Except at the end of their next walk, nose kisses had turned to full on kisses and her hands found their way into his hair. He reached gently for her hips, and Margitte knew it wasn’t in the same way he’d reached for her waist at the ball at Halamshiral.

She flinched away so violently that her side slammed into his desk and his fingers went with it.

Cullen yelped several uncouth words and withdrew his smashed fingers back to nurse them in his mouth. Margitte wanted to apologize for the injury but an immediate wave of tears of shame choked her words back. 

Didn’t she want this? Hadn’t she thought about it a thousand times up in her quarters at night—sometimes drifting off to sleep with the assistance of her hand and imagining how it would be to be in his bed instead?

He still hadn’t removed his fingers from his mouth but the surveying look he gave her screamed concern. 

“I can’t,” she whispered, blinking back the shame that had risen from her throat to her eyes.

“I didn’t mean to imply—“ he began.

“I can’t because we’d conceive a child, and they’d take her away like they took Lilly’s baby.”

His fingers fell out of his mouth in shock.

“I…what?”

She turned to face the window, unable to look at him anymore, and pulled the coat ever tighter around her in an attempt to disappear.

She had been seventeen, and Lillian had been a good friend, almost a mentor, since she’d arrived at the Circle five years earlier.

Lillian had always been what Margitte wished she could be: confident, charming, intelligent, really all that girls from noble backgrounds were supposed to be…with the exception of the mage aspect. She was three years older, so she’d gone through her Harrowing first. She had told Margitte exactly what to expect at her own Harrowing, breaking every rule laid down by the Templars to lull her panicking friend into a fitful sleep.

Lillian also had her pick of any man at the Circle: mage or templar, and she knew it. Sometimes Margitte hoped that Lilly would discover affection for women too, and maybe she could kiss her in the library instead of watching all the boys get to. But Lilly’s persuasion never changed, and Margitte played look out while her friend spent time in broom closets and abandoned bookshelves with men who didn’t deserve her.

“Don’t worry so much!” Lilly had told her. “I might as well have some fun while I’m stuck here for the rest of my life!”

Until the year after the Blight when it wasn’t just fun anymore, and the baby in Lilly’s belly meant everything would change.

Margitte held Lilly’s hair while she lay draped over a washbasin, before she knew what her morning illness meant. She delighted in the little fluttering kicks that kept her friend awake half the night and left her grumpy in the morning lessons. Sometimes the other mages whispered about what happened to babies born in the Circle, but Margitte refused to believe it. The Templars couldn’t take a child from its mother just because she had magical abilities. They would surely let Lilly keep her baby with her. She would be a fantastic mother.

Vidia woke Margitte in the middle of the night with nothing more than a shake and two words: “It’s time”. Mentor and student had thrown their robes on over their nightclothes and gone to Lilly who seemed as unperturbed by her labor as she was about most things in life.

Lilly kept the jokes going until the pain truly began to set in, and Margitte held her hands and whispered encouragements. When soft moans gave way to curse words and then simply wails and Lilly couldn’t swallow the pain potions anymore, they’d eased her to the edge of the bed and onto her feet. Vidia turned to Margitte and said, “You catch it.”

She did. Lilly brought the baby forth in blood and pain, and Margitte turned its head as instructed and announced to an exhausted trio: “It’s a little girl!”

The babe was a perfectly formed girl: ten fingers, ten toes, a shock of brown hair, and an impressive set of lungs. Vidia bundled Lilly up in the bed and handed her her daughter. Lilly said she’d be called Antonia.

The Templars came less than three hours later. Margitte and Lilly’s friend, Riel, had been among them, though he’d hung behind and turned his head away as the Knight Commander plucked Antonia from her mother’s arms. Even the fierce protests of Allegra Trevelya, Margitte’s older cousin and a young woman well on her way to First Enchanter if she kept impressing everyone as she was wont to do, did nothing.

Antonia was handed to a wet nurse and sent to the Circle in Kirkwall. Lilly did not speak again for close on half a year. Even when her smile returned, it was not the same. She drifted away from Margitte and the others around her. 

Margitte did not know what happened to mother or daughter after the rebellion began.

“So I can’t,” she whispered to Cullen again, her cheeks wet and her hands numb from clenching into fists.

“Then we won’t,” he said.

She finally turned to face him once more, and she wasn’t sure if his look of concern made her feel better or worse.

“Don’t you know I want to though?”

He grinned, despite himself, at these words. A steady blush was creeping up his neck into his ears.

“Perhaps…” He cleared his throat and tried again. “Perhaps we worry about Corypheus for now, and this at…another time.”

“You aren’t angry?” she asked.

“Angry?”

He took several steps to close the space between them and reached out to her but then seemed to remember what had happened the last time he’d done so and withdrew his hand. She caught it with her own and held on.

“I will never be angry with you, Gitta. Not for this.”

Cullen kissed her nose again. She felt a blush rise on her cheeks to match his. 

They did end up in his bed, but only for a nap that felt as forbidden as any intimacy for the Inquisitor and her commander.


End file.
